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I took his words to heart, internalizing the message. He was right. He was so right, and it was high time I dipped into the full potential of what my angel body could actually do.
As I fought, my power surged within me, rolling and roiling underneath my skin, and I used it in the way Azazel had shown me, my control over it better than ever before. In a mix of targeted lightning and precisely aimed pushes of pure power, I shoved the angel back, back, back, the fury inside me lending raw strength to my movements. My wings, too, were now an integral part of how I fought, giving me a wider range.
I saw the exact moment my opponent realized she’d miscalculated and underestimated me. Her eyes widened, and regret flashed across her expression just a second before I disarmed her, too, and stopped with my sword at her throat.
And so it went. I kept picking new sparring partners, and one after the other, they ended up beaten by me. If I’d been in any kind of mindset of the “me before Azazel had been caught,” I would have marveled at this new prowess I was showing here on the training fields. As it was, though, I wasn’t in the headspace to marvel. I wanted blood.
I imagined each and every one of these angels to be the one standing between me and liberating Azazel, and it did the trick like nothing ever had before. If I were to go into a competition with this kind of mindset, I’d be sure to win another rank.
Only, I didn’t give a fuck about that anymore.
Hours later, an angel I didn’t know came by to collect me, instructing me to follow him to receive my new assignment in Archangel Raphael’s personal employ.
The nerves I’d managed to keep pushed down during my fighting exercises now threatened to bubble up and ruin my composure as I landed next to my escort in front of a large building on the grounds of Raphael’s estate. Folding my wings and vanishing them, I peered at the massive structure looming above me.
I knew immediately the purpose of this building, recognizing the style of its construction as similar to Derdekea’s own soul stables. As with everything here in Heaven, it was not merely functional but also pleasing to the eye, the big structure embellished by murals and carvings on the huge walls.
By design, soul stables didn’t really need windows, since the purpose of the rooms inside was to provide a place of confinement for individual souls rather than to house someone who would need or want to actually look outside and enjoy the natural light of the everlasting celestial sunset. The souls would only ever gaze upon their own personal afterlife projection, which would give them all the input and impressions they could ever desire.
The intention of the soul stable buildings, then, was primarily to be able to contain as many souls as possible, like a huge warehouse. In modern human societies, such a building would be designed in as drably functional a way possible, maximizing space while keeping construction costs low by only using as much material as was necessary to achieve its goal, resulting in an eyesore made of concrete and steel.
Here in Heaven, on the other hand, anything that needed to be built had to both serve its primary purpose and manage the feat of enhancing the beauty of its surroundings. Which was the reason the soul stables rivaled cathedrals and sprawling temple compounds in their decorative prettiness.
After all, it wouldn’t do for angels to have to keep flying to and from and past anything but a stunning masterpiece of architectural elegance.
Raphael’s soul stable would have taken up several New York City blocks—and at the thought of one of my favorite metropolises, my heart pinched, remembering its massive destruction during the thwarted apocalypse eight years ago. God, I hoped the city had recovered and that the casualties hadn’t been as high as it had seemed back then.
And what, exactly, had humans made of these events? Had the whole thing ripped the wool from their eyes as to the existence of the supernatural beyond their imagination? Or had they found some logical excuse to explain away the emergence of three-headed hounds and winged warriors who’d wreaked such havoc on the population?
None of the magazines or other material relating to current events on Earth that Naamah had supplied me with had mentioned anything about an actual apocalypse… Had Heaven covered it all up somehow?
“So you’re the one who caught him.”
The statement jolted me out of my conspiracy musings, pulling my attention to the angel who’d come out of the soul stable to greet us. Her dark locks formed a voluminous mane around her head, her golden eyes shrewd as she looked me over.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
The hint of a grim smile adorned her dark brown face. “Impressive. Now, I understand His Highness has assigned you to join us, so I’ll be showing you around and letting you shadow me for today. You haven’t done interrogation work before, have you?”
I shook my head.
“Right. You’re barely much more than a baby in terms of age.”
I bristled, but she raised a hand.
“No offense intended, so untwist your wings. From what I heard, you’ve only been here eight years, and you’d just been made an angel after the new truce was struck. Which means you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn how to interrogate anyone.” She leaned forward, her eyes flashing. “In order to hone the skills of extracting information from someone determined to keep their mouth shut, you kind of need an enemy, because we don’t practice that shit on our own. And seeing as we’ve been in a precarious truce for thousands of years where we don’t really have reason to capture enemy fighters, the only ones among us who have any personal experience in torturing someone for intel are those who were around during the original war.”
My eyes widened as I studied her again. That meant she was?—
“Yep,” she said with a smirk. “I’m that old. My name is Ithuriel, and I’ve been serving as seraph under His Highness since before Lucifer’s fall.”
I went down on one knee and bowed my head in proper greeting for her rank.
“Rise, child.” She impatiently waved me up. “You’ll watch me work on him today, and I want you to take note of not just what I do and the questions I ask, but also the pattern of it. There’s a rhythm to this kind of interrogation.”
She beckoned me to follow her as she turned and walked toward the door to the soul stable. Ornate carvings adorned the entrance, which was of regular size in contrast to the massive doors to other official angel buildings. Much like Derdekea’s stable, this one didn’t feature a large lobby inside either, but rather a simple corridor leading to the back, with doors on either side—each the entrance to a room for an individual soul. To the left, a staircase granted access to the upper levels with more rooms for souls.
If this was similar to Derdekea’s stable, there’d be more corridors forking off toward the back. If viewed from above, the layout would look like the grid of a city planned in rectangular blocks so as to better maximize the space utilization, with the clusters of rooms being the city blocks and the corridors acting as “streets.”
